WellPoint: Big Industry Changes, Big Data

Nice interview with Lori Beer, EVP at WellPoint which (via various Blues) provides health insurance to 70 million people.

“About 80% of our consumers today are covered through employer benefits. As a result of the ACA (“Obamacare”), coverage will be available to more consumers, and employers are going to look at how they manage their costs and whether it's more effective for their employees to purchase insurance with the subsidies on the exchanges. We do believe that over time -- not early on, but over time -- there will be a transition from employer-based coverage to more consumers as purchasers. So we have a lot of focus on the consumer experience because today consumers are not really engaged in making decisions about quality, affordable health care.”

“Our health-data warehouse is bigger than the Library of Congress. We have a ton of information, and that's frankly one of the challenges in health care -- getting at the information that's relevant and that can make an impact. We've been focused on organizing that information. With our 34 million active members plus membership we had previously, we have data on around 100 million individuals. We have a lot of claim history, pharmacy data, laboratory data. The innovation around this for us was inspired by our work with (IBM’s) Watson. It has great information about research and emerging health care information, and all the knowledge from the evidence that it's collected. But to get to the right decision, you need an accurate, single best record of patient data, and that includes the data that we have, integrated with the rich clinical data that comes out of the electronic medical records that physicians have.”